Institute

Founded in 1994, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin is one of the more than 80 research institutes administered by the Max Planck Society. It is dedicated to the study of the history of science and aims to understand scientific thinking and practice as historical phenomena.

People

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science comprises scholars across all Departments and Research Groups, as well as an Administration team, IT Support, Research IT Group, and Research Coordination and Communications team.

Publications & Resources

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) engages with the research community and broader public, and is committed to open access.

This section provides access to published research results and electronic sources in the history of science. It is also a platform for sharing ongoing research projects that develop digital tools.

Researchers at the Institute benefit from an internal Library service. The Institute’s research is also made accessible to the wider public through edited Feature Stories and the Mediathek’s audio and video content.

News & Events

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science frequently shares news, including calls for papers and career opportunities. The Media & Press section highlights press releases and the Institute's appearances in national and global media. Public events—including colloquia, seminars, and workshops—are shown on the events overview.

Horst Kant

Visiting Scholar (Jun 2011-Dec 2017)

Horst Kant is a physicist and historian of science. He received his physics diploma at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 1969. In 1978, he was a scientific researcher. He founded Dieter Hoffmann in 1978 as a working group on physics history in the physical society of the GDR, which Kant headed until 1990. He worked at the Institute for Theory, History, and Organization of Sciences at Hubert Laitko in the Academy of Sciences of the GDR.

Horst Kant has been at the MPIWG since 1995. He is mainly concerned with the history of natural sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for example with an early history of radioactivity and nuclear fission (Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, Werner Heisenberg in the Second World War), Soviet physics history, physics history in Berlin and physical history institutions.

He is a member of the Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftschaftsforschung Berlin. Since 2014 he has been a member of the Leibniz Association of Sciences in Berlin and since 2016 deputy secretary of the class of natural sciences and engineering sciences.